The Cheerleader
“So I moved to Seattle because I wanted to rock, I mean really rock, none of that girl pop stuff neither” starts this apocalyptic manifesto of the malaise generations. “I had my guitar strapped to my back and I could almost see myself playing it.” The work of young fourteen year old Claire, this is nine pages of blistering prose, funny and bitter, sarcastic and sad. Batler plays chords of adolescent innocence and world weary guitar solos of indifference to make a dissonant pop song about lost dreams and insipid desires. Batler’s narrator’s search for redemption in the form of some kind of rebellious cliche perfectly evokes our own desperate need to recast the pop continuum in our own flawed image. What can I say about the Cheerleader? A girl goes to Seattle to make good in a mythical riottt grrrl world. She dreams of a future that we all dream off, imagines a past that never existed, ends up jumping up and down, shaking her pom_poms. A provocative, subtle debut. (HN)
zine, #1, 9 pgs, $1, Claire Batler, 15 Lytton Blvd., Toronto, ON, M4R 1K9